Chapter 4
When Imogen Clarke got pregnant with Anders Dalsing’s child unexpectedly, she told him he could be as involved or as uninvolved as he wanted to be.
His response was to send papers terminating his parental rights along with a substantial sum of money to keep quiet about the situation. Message very much received, thank you.
Clarke grew up knowing who her biological father was and that he wasn’t interested in being anything other than her biological father.
Imogen always told Clarke that she could give racing a try if she was interested or not, that she didn’t owe Anders either participation or refusal, and Clarke was happy to exist in that ambivalence until a friend had his eighth birthday party at a go-kart track.
She fell in love with racing the instant she felt that tiny motor rumble.
The friends she made in the sport knew who Anders was (he was at the peak of his career around then), but they didn’t know that he was her father.
Some of them had relatives who were in racing, too, and she saw the pressure and the teasing they endured.
She told Julian and Connor, once she knew she could trust them, but otherwise she kept her mouth shut and pointed at her stepdad when people asked who her father was.
She doesn’t feel bad about the misdirected resentment. He’s done plenty of other crap in the nearly two years since for Clarke’s opinion of him to solidify based on personal experience.
Case in point: She could’ve gone to bed early last night in a hotel, seen one of F0’s doctors this morning, then ridden halfway around the planet with the media team mostly leaving her alone.
Instead, Anders critiqued every aspect of Clarke’s performance during the flight, she spent half the night unable to sleep because she was too busy thinking about how badly she always sleeps here, and then Anders’s personal physician arrived at the crack of double-dawn to make displeased faces at her bruising and ask if she wants something more powerful for the pain.
Clarke doesn’t want painkillers. Forced to watch Anders showboat as a proud parent, Clarke wants a drink. Or six.
“Two racing simulators in the home office, huh?” asks Sara, who runs all of Elemental’s social accounts and moderates what Clarke and Matthew post to theirs. “For a retired pilot, some might call that—”
“Obsessed?” Anders cuts in, laughing. The room has enormous windows looking out over the property; sunlight, real and fake, floods in to line everything in gold. “That’s one of the milder words that’s been used to describe me.”
“I’ve used stronger words just this morning,” Clarke adds from the doorway.
It’s only true if you count what Clarke’s been thinking within the confines of her own skull, but this is who they are for the cameras.
Anders plays the father making up for lost time, teaching his long-lost child everything he knows, reentering the racing world with grace and self-deprecation. Clarke plays his headstrong daughter.
Notice how it’s more about Anders than it is about Clarke? Yeah, Clarke noticed, too.
Sara wears a ring on each finger that controls a thumb-size, flying camera. She twists and flicks like the conductor of a symphony orchestra while working, sending the cameras to new vantage points while monitoring footage live on the implant behind her left eye.
She directs two of the cameras to Clarke now. “What was the problem this morning? A little too overbearing after last night’s incident?”
Sara’s great at asking questions that get her the answers she wants, so she can piece together the narrative that will do best. Clarke appreciates that about her. “You have no idea. It’s like he’s never seen someone crash before.”
“It’s different when it’s your kid,” Anders says. “I think I might still be having the heart attack that started when I got the call yesterday.”
Sara clacks all the rings on her right hand together, something she’s explained drops a mark in the recording she can easily find later for editing. “I wouldn’t say you ‘got the call.’ It implies that you weren’t watching the race live.”
“People understand that I’m a busy man, Ms. Cohen, but sure. Ready?”
“Ready.”
“It’s different when it’s your kid. I think I might still be having the heart attack that started when I saw the flames.”
Clarke hates this. Understands it. Hates it.
The initial concept for this visit was Anders-focused with a few cameos from Clarke, but Sara’s adamant that after yesterday, the fans are going to want to see more of Clarke being okay.
She follows them from room to room as the tour proceeds, dutifully commenting on this piece of artwork or that trophy, and practices rotating her shoulder without wincing when the cameras aren’t looking.
“I think that just about does it,” Sara says when they make it to the kitchen where a chef droid is setting up a meal that they’ll pretend Anders and Clarke made together.
Naomi, who’s been taking a call outside for most of the morning, comes in from the patio.
“We’ll do the questions about the rest of the season over lunch, and then we’ll be out of your hair. ”
“Sounds good,” Anders says, taking up position at the counter. He picks up a knife to chop something on the cutting board. The chef droid swoops in, replaces that knife with one better suited to the task, and swoops out again.
Sara clacks her rings. “It’s no secret that Elemental’s season hasn’t gotten off to the start everyone had been hoping for. Anders, do you think there’s still time to turn it around?”
“There’s always time,” Anders says. Naomi plants a hand in the middle of Clarke’s back and pushes her toward the stove, miming that she should pick up a spoon and stir whatever’s cooking.
“Half a season is just that, half a season. With the right upgrades to the ship, and if Madeline starts performing the way I know she can, there’s no reason Elemental can’t course correct and still come out of this in third or fourth overall. ”
He doesn’t have to say aloud that Elemental’s so far out of the running for first or second that it’s not even worth talking about.
Championships are won by points, which are awarded on a sliding scale from P1 to P15 each race (no points for the five people who finish last).
Both your team’s pilots have to consistently be finishing near the top if you want a shot at winning the team championship.
Based on the dominance Provenance and Chronicle have shown this season, it’s highly unlikely that any other team could raise the trophy.
Highly unlikely, but not impossible. That’s part of what makes Formula Zero exciting.
Back-of-pack teams will start to get mathematically eliminated from winning the championship in the second half of the season, but for now, it’s still all up for grabs.
And in a sport where the difference between finishing second and third in the team bracket means a massive funding differential for next year, every point matters.
Clarke, at present, has 28 points. Matthew has 31. Julian has 153. Delphine has 163.
“Is that the advice you would give Yves?” Sara prompts.
Anders scrapes his cutting board into a bowl.
“I’m just a talking head, so I’m not sure I’m in any position to give a team principal advice, but if I was going to, yeah.
The ship needs work, and Madeline needs to improve.
No pilot likes hearing that they need to do better, because we’d all love to think that it’s the ship’s fault, but it’s a mix. ”
“If you’ve got concrete suggestions, I’m all ears,” Clarke says, poking at the pan. “I’m hearing a lot of ‘Clarke needs to do better,’ but not much ‘here’s how Clarke can do better.’ ”
“Madeline,” Anders says, chiding.
The annoyance that’s been building behind her sternum all morning abruptly reaches a breaking point.
She slaps her spoon down. Sauce splatters onto the pristine backsplash.
“What? It’s true. You and Yves are happy to tell me I’m screwing up, but not how, or how to fix it.
If you can help me, help me, don’t tell me that you can help me and then not—”
Sara clacks her rings. Naomi purses her lips. Anders looks at Clarke like she’s a disappointment.
She deflates. “Sorry.”
“It’s fine,” Sara says, a touch too quick. “But maybe make a joke about how this is going to be a fun topic for lunch conversation? Or bring it back to the racing sims in Anders’s office, like say he can give you pointers there after you’re done eating.”
“Sure,” Clarke says, and feels her cloud of misery grow just that much darker.
—
Anders finds her on the patio later, after Naomi and Sara have retreated to their guest bedrooms to finish up some work before dinner. There’s a balcony overhead. Clarke keeps moving her chair to stay in the shade as the fake sun lowers itself toward the horizon.
“What do you know about Elemental’s ownership?” Anders asks, not waiting for Clarke to look up.
Clarke toggles between minute engine setup differences on her holoscreen, a small workspace projected out of the cuff around her wrist that also contains her universal Link ID credentials and serves as an all-in-one communication device.
She owes Amira a final answer soon, so the part of the team that’s with her ship en route to the next track can start making changes tomorrow morning.
“Forty-eight percent shareholder, fifty-two percent some private citizen whose name I’m not important enough to know and only ever votes by proxy. Why?”
“You should be aware of the environment you’re operating in.”
Clarke locks in her choice, collapses the screen into her cuff, and turns her attention on Anders. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Anders gazes out into the distance. There’s a city skyline not too far from here, and the angled red plains of unterraformed landscape beyond. “You don’t have to respond to every statement like it’s a personal attack.”
“Call it learned wariness with how you approach my perceived shortcomings. What do you know about Elemental’s ownership that I don’t?”
The silence is one Clarke recognizes: Anders trying to decide what information to divulge, lording over her that he knows something she doesn’t. Clarke holds her tongue, refusing to give him the satisfaction of asking again even as the itch of curiosity grows.
He does know things she doesn’t. It’s why she puts effort into maintaining a decent relationship with him, why she tries not to let the depth of her conflicted feelings toward him show.
He and Yves are friends, dating back longer than Clarke’s been alive.
They talk regularly. Whatever Yves’s plans are for Clarke, Anders probably knows them.
He wouldn’t tell her, if she asked. Anders and Yves are part of their own little club, and neither of them care about Clarke beyond what she can do for their legacies in the sport.
Until Yves wants Clarke to know, Anders won’t tell her, so there’s no point asking.
But this—there’s something about Elemental’s leadership that Anders wants her paying attention to.
“Ownership can’t be happy about the team’s recent performance,” Clarke says, irritated that she’s been reduced to guessing but not willing to lose the chance to learn something that might help her.
“It’s been decades since Elemental’s last championship, and years since the team’s been truly competitive.
We’re not keeping up with the other mid-pack teams in terms of technical development. ”
If there was a single camera in the vicinity, Anders wouldn’t let Clarke say something negative about Elemental without correcting her (He’s allowed to criticize the team.
She’s not). But it’s just the two of them, so he simply nods.
“And if you were the majority owner of a team that was steadily falling behind their peers, what would you do?”
Bring in new leadership, which Clarke absolutely cannot say to this man who is good friends with Elemental’s leader.
There are some others in the mix—a director of operations, a technical director, a racing program director—but Yves is the team principal.
Ultimately, success or failure rests on Yves’s shoulders.
If he can’t get the job done, ownership should be looking for someone who can.
Clarke goes for something inoffensive and middle-of-the-road. “Depends, I guess.”
“On?”
“You’d have to make a choice. Are you going to stick it out, have faith in your organization and the path you started down however many years ago, or are you going to shake things up and try something new?”
He turns to face her. “Is that all? Those are your only options?”
Shit. Clarke’s missing something. She’s failing this impromptu quiz, and Anders doesn’t give credit for attempts.
Bizarrely, she wishes Julian were here. He has a deeper understanding of the politics at play in F0, and would probably see in a heartbeat what Anders is getting at.
“You could do nothing, I guess, but that’s functionally the same as the first one, so—yeah, those are your options.
Both are risky, in their own way. There’d be a lot of factors to consider. ”
“Are you a factor?”
“What?”
“Have you done enough, as a pilot, to make yourself a factor in how Elemental’s ownership should proceed? Have you proven that they can build a future around you?”
Embarrassment rushes in her ears. “It’s only my sophomore season.”
“In Julian’s sophomore season, he came within forty points of taking the championship from Delphine.”
It’s a low blow. Not an original one, not something Clarke hasn’t heard (or thought) a million times before, but it’s more brutal coming from the mouth of the man who provided half her genetics.
She’s never needed his approval, but sometimes she can’t help wanting it, and moments like this make her hate herself for being so weak.
“We have different teams,” she tries. “Different machines. It’s not the same.”
“Clearly,” Anders says, a dismissal and a condemnation all in one, and leaves Clarke alone on the patio once more.